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Innovation in Journalism Goes Begging for Support

Journalism has a shortage of many things: capital, advertisers and, in some instances, readers. But certainly its most precious commodity is innovation.

Again and again, the business struggles to get out of the rut that put it on a road to ruin in the first place. Consider the fate of the Web site Homicide Watch DC. When it popped up out of nowhere with a way of tracking every murder in Washington, it seemed likely that a big news organization would snap it up or that foundations would trip over themselves to shove money at them.

It hasn’t turned out that way. Two years after it began, Homicide Watch is on hiatus and its founders, Laura and Chris Amico, find themselves with the tin cup out on Kickstarter looking for money to sustain the site.

At the heart of Homicide Watch is its mission statement: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” It’s a remarkable thing to behold — part database, part news site, it also serves as a kind of digital memorial for homicide victims in Washington. Their pictures are published, their cases are followed and their deaths are acknowledged as a meaningful event in the life of the city.

Neither The Washington Post nor the weekly Washington City Paper covers homicide comprehensively — come to think of it, almost no major newspaper does. It is difficult but important work that current business models won’t accommodate, and Homicide Watch reaches an underserved community, since most of the victims are black.

But even though it has received all kinds of notice in the press and went from 500 page views a month to more than 300,000, it remained the handiwork of a wife and husband team.

“We reached a tipping point about nine months ago, when I think everybody just assumed we had been funded because of the buzz and coverage,” Laura Amico said. “But the fact of the matter is, no one was funding it but us. We have this high visibility, but every door that we knocked on was closed to us.”

The couple applied three times for financing from the Knight News Challenge and also sought grants from the Robert R. McCormick Foundation and J-Lab’s New Media Women Entrepreneurs and several others, including some nonjournalism foundations. Each time they came away empty.

You could blame it on the topic — murder is not anybody’s idea of a sexy topic for a Web site — but as Mr. Amico pointed out, newspapers have been using crime news to attract big audiences for a long time, so it’s more complicated than that. Neither hyper-local, which was all the rage for a while, nor strictly investigative, which is often a magnet for financing, the site didn’t fit neatly into the pigeon holes that foundations have at the ready. Like the victims it covers, Homicide Watch ended up falling through the cracks.

I thought about Homicide Watch when I read Alan D. Mutter’s recent post about the big chunks of financing that are going to tiny experimental outfits named The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times. In May, the Ford Foundation gave The Times $1 million over two years to hire five reporters to cover ethnic and prison issues even though the paper is owned by the Tribune Company, which may be in bankruptcy but has amassed nearly $2.4 billion in cash during its three and a half years in court.

Photo

Laura and Chris Amico, the founders of Homicide Watch, check their progress in securing funds on Kickstarter.Credit
Katherine Taylor for The New York Times

In July, the foundation awarded The Washington Post $500,000 for government accountability reporting.

The moves, while laudable in terms of intent, create an odd hybrid — a news organization that runs as a business, but has a pod of reporters who are financed on a different model, and presumably, operate under different rules. For example, reporting financed by the foundation must be free to all and available for reuse without copyright, an anomaly at The Times, which has a pay wall.

Alfred Ironside, director of communications at the Ford Foundation, said there was nothing unusual about a foundation working with a profit-making enterprise and that it was a well-established practice in the current tax code.

“The good news is we are funding all sorts of things in journalism,” he said, ticking off a list of grants to organizations like ProPublica, The Chicago Reporter, the Center for Public Integrity and GlobalPost. “Our approach in this evolving media landscape is to think about how we can support meaningful and sustainable journalism that reaches a broad audience.”

Setting aside the issue of whether foundations should finance profit-making organizations, it is worth noting that many promising journalistic operations have foundered on the regulatory shoals of the Internal Revenue Service, with its bizarre standards for deciding whether an organization qualifies for nonprofit status. (As Mr. Mutter points out, the I.R.S. says journalism doesn’t meet the standard of a nonprofit activity, but perhaps it just hasn’t been watching the industry’s balance sheet lately.)

A broader question lurks as well. Shouldn’t financing meant for journalistic innovation go to the green shoots like Homicide Watch and not be used to fertilize giant dead-tree media? I am all for putting more reporting boots on the ground, but the existential dilemma confronting media will require new answers, not stopgap funds for legacy approaches. (I write these words knowing that I may well eat them someday. I wonder if I would be so picky about the source of funds if I were the one being financed.)

Not all the news is bad at Homicide Watch. It will probably reach its goal of $40,000 on Kickstarter before the deadline this Thursday; that money will be used to train journalism students to use the platform and sustain its mission. (On Sunday evening, after a version of this column was published on the Web, Homicide Watch met its fund-raising goal.) And part of the reason the site is on hiatus is that Ms. Amico was awarded a Nieman-Berkman Fellowship and is at Harvard for the school year, with her husband joining her as an affiliate.

It was Ms. Amico, 30, a former crime reporter at The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, Calif., who covered every murder in Washington for the past two years, working full time as an army of one. (She was honored by The New York Times, which then owned The Press Democrat, for her work at that newspaper.)

Mr. Amico, 31, a reporter and Web developer who has worked with “PBS NewsHour” and NPR, worked nights and weekends to create a searchable database of her reporting. When I talked to them on the phone from Boston, they were happy to tell me that they had licensed their software for the first time, to The Trentonian, which is owned by The Journal Register.

After having little luck with foundations — “We should have had a third person working on just those issues,” Mr. Amico said — the pair decided, ironically enough, to go the profit-making route. They are hoping that their tracking software will find traction in the marketplace and that a journalism school will agree to help continue the work of Homicide Watch DC.

In the meantime murder, which never goes on hiatus, continues apace. Since Homicide Watch quit watching in the middle of August, Ms. Amico said that three more murders had taken place in Washington, and five arrests had been made.

A version of this article appears in print on September 10, 2012, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Innovation In Journalism Goes Begging For Support. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe